Apron

How to spell apron

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce apron

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does apron mean?

1. nounA protective garment worn over the front of the body and tied at the waist to keep clothes clean while cooking or working.
2. nounThe paved area at an airport where aircraft are parked, loaded, and refuelled.

Apron in a sentence

• The chef tied a fresh apron before the dinner rush.

• The plane taxied slowly across the apron toward the terminal.

• Flour dusted the front of her cotton apron all afternoon.

• Ground crew refuelled the jet on the apron between flights.

Where does apron come from?

Language of origin: French

Apron is one of English's great accidents of mishearing. It came from the Old French naperon, a little diminutive of nape meaning 'tablecloth' or 'cloth', which itself goes back to the Latin mappa, a napkin or cloth (the same root that gives us 'map' and 'napkin'). In Middle English the word was actually 'napron', spelled with an initial n. Over time, when people said 'a napron', the n drifted across the gap so that listeners reinterpreted the phrase as 'an apron', a process linguists call false splitting or rebracketing. By the 1400s the n had vanished for good, and the same slip happened in reverse to give us 'newt' from 'an ewte' and 'nickname' from 'an eke-name'. That lost n is exactly why the spelling looks so unlike the cloth it descends from.

How the word is built

• apron (originally napron, from Old French nape: tablecloth
• -eron diminutive)